1948 by Benny Morris

Back in 2006 I read two books on the Arab-Israeli wars: Michael Oren's Six Days of War and Abraham Rabinovich's The Yom Kippur War. Oren's was the superior book, because he succeeded in not just analyzing the military conflict, but in establishing the context for the Six-Day War on two fronts: its place in 1967's global politics, and in Arab-Israeli history.

Integral to an understanding of that history is a familiarity with the 1948 War, which set the stage for everything that happened in the decades since. Though I read and enjoyed Martin Gilbert's Israel as a teenager, my knowledge of Israel's War of Independence has remained rather simplistic: Jews immigrate to Palestine, fight British, British turn the issue over to the United Nations, U.N. plans partition, Israel declares statehood, Arab nations invade, Israel defeats them.

Since so many of the present debates over Israeli/Palestinian issues can be traced back to the events of the late 1940s, most books written about that era exhibit the deep biases of their authors. I have avoided them for that reason. In his new book, 1948, Benny Morris has managed to present a remarkably even-handed account of the conflict.

Morris starts the book with a historical background that traces developments under the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the interwar rule by the British. This era see a dramatic rise in Jewish immigration and the Zionist movement, encouraged by the Balfour Declaration in 1917 suggesting British government support for a Jewish state. Subsequent attempts by the British to appease both their Arab allies and the growing Jewish population only resulted in the Mandate inhabitants taking turns attacking the British. Arab unrest culminated in a massive revolt from 1936-1939. This episode also marked the beginning of a pattern of Arab self-destruction. In response to the violence, the British offered to retract the Balfour declaration, promising a unified Palestinian state within ten years with severely curtailed Jewish immigration; the Palestinian Arabs "maganed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory" by rejecting this and demanding "full cessation of Jewish immigration, immediate British withdrawal, and immediate independence." Instead, they got nothing out of the three years of violence, except for the near total destruction of their political class:

The Arab Revolt thus ended in unmitigated defeat for the Palestinians Somewhere between three thousand and six thousand of their political and military activists had been killed, with many thousands more either driven into exile or jailed; the leadership of the Palestine Arab national movement was decimated, exiled, or jailed; and a deep chasm, characterized by blood feuds, divided the society's elite families... The Palestinians had also suffered serious economic harm, through both the general strike and British repression. They had prematurely expended their military power against the wrong enemy and had been dealt a mortal blow in advance of the battle with the real enemy, Zionism. The damage to their war effort in 1947-1948 was incalculable.

In contrast, Morris traces the urgent efforts by the Yishuv to prepare for the coming conflict by building workable political, military, and civic institutions, and circumventing limits on immigration and the arms trade. Thus when the Jews escalate their attacks on the British after World War II, "the British cabinet decided to wash its hands of Palestine and dump the problem in the lap of the United Nations." As the British prepare to leave, the Yishuv already has in place the framework of a functioning government. From here, Morris divides the conflict into two main phases: a civil war between Jews and Palestinian Arabs from November 1947 (after the U.N. approved its partition plan) until May 1948 (when the British Mandate ended), and the international conflict which began with the Pan-Arab invasion on 15 May 1948.

Morris lays out the self-interested nature of the Arab nations that invaded after the British withdrawal. The Jordanians had particularly grand ambitions. Rather than even pretend to take up the cause of Palestinian statehood, Jordan had sought to simply substitute themselves and expand their territory through secret negotiations with the Yishuv:

[W]hen partion reemerged at the end of [World War II] as a possible solution to the Palestine conundrum, Abdullah... saw his chance. Of course, he sought a partition not between the Jews and the Palestine Arabs, but between the Jews and himself... The Palestine Arabs, crushed by Britian in 1936-39 and still weak, could be ignored. Palestine or parts of it could be fused with Transjordan--if only there was agreement with Britian and the Jews, respectively Abdullah's political-military patron and his powerful neighbors.

Though no agreement was reached, this ambition informed Abdullah's war goals, and explain why he aimed to merely occupy the portions of the Arab-occupied West Bank that his troops would take with little resistance after crossing the Jordan. The other Arab states took note of this selfish move and adjusted their war plans accordingly. This universal self-interest would prevent any semblance of a unified strategy between the Arab forces:

[I]n the days before and after 15 May the war plan had changed in essence from a united effort to conquer large parts of the nascent Jewish state, and perhaps destroy it, into an uncoordinated multilateral land grab. As a collective, the Arab states still wished and hoped to destroy Israel--and, had their armies encountered no serious resistance, would, without doubt, have proceeded to take all of Palestine, including Tel Aviv and Haifa. But, in the circumstances, their invasion now aimed at seriously injuring the Yishuv and conquering some of its territory while occupying all or most of the areas earmarked for Palestinian Arab statehood.

Although the Arab leaders vaguely alluded to a duty to "save the Palestinians," none of them seriously contemplated the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state... all, to one degree or another, care little about Palestinian goals, their rhetoric notwithstanding.

This would set the stage for six decades of Arab monarchs and dictators using the Palestinians as a rallying cry to further their own interests and distract their citizens from focusing their anger on internal issues. Contrast this with the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews displaced from Arab nations (from Morocco to Iraq) by violence after 1947:

Israel's leaders, already in 1948, by way of rebuffing Arab efforts to achieve repatriation of the Palestinian refugees, pointed out that what had taken place was a double exodus, or an unplanned "exchange of population," more or less of equal numbers, with a similar massive loss of property affecting both the Palestinian refugees and the Jewish refugees... The Jewish refugee problem quickly disappeared as Israel absorbed them; the Palestinian refugee problem persisted (and persists), as the Arab states largely failed to absorb their refugees, leaving many of them stateless and languishing in refugee camps and living on international charity.

Unfortunately, Morris' anaylsis of political history and its effect on the war grows shallow and infrequent as the book progresses. Once the Arab invasion begins, Morris' recitation of military encounters is both exhaustive and exhausting, taking up better than 200 pages for six months of fighting. There are so many raids and battles, so many hills and villages, so many battalions and brigades that it becomes nearly impossible to digest. The maps are either too focused or too broad, and thus unable to convey both the tactical and the strategic progress of the war.

Morris devotes insufficient attention to the larger political machinations at work, whether on the global stage, or at the regional level. His narrative occasionally hints at these issues, such as the start of the Cold War, the tensions between Britain and America, and the inter-Arab rivalries (where were the Saudis?). But they are only mentioned when they happen to interrupt the flow of military events, like when the threat of British intervention prevents Israel from cutting off the remaining Egyptian troops in the Gaza Strip.

Morris certainly provided a detailed examination of the military aspects of the conflict. He is to be congratulated on the balanced portrait he provides of Israeli and Arab behavior in the war; even in the discussion of wartime atrocities, or the expulsion of refugees, he provides a sober and sympathetic analysis that incorporates each side's perspective. He simply missed an opportunity to apply his even-handed approach to the bigger picture.